I'm a developer and web designer. I am also a recent Mac convert. My first computer was a TI 99/4a when I was eleven. The following year, I did odd jobs in order to make enough money to buy the Commodore 64. By the time I was fourteen, I had moved on to the Commodore Amiga 500. The Amiga was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. It's operating system was comparable to earlier editions of Mac OS. I'd like to say that from there I went on to Apple computers, but I didn't. I was taking computer classes in school, and my instructor led me towards a 286. He felt that for programmers there was no reason to have anything other than an Intel based machine. For the next eighteen years, I used Windows and Linux exclusively.
Two things brought me to the world of Apple. First was my frustration with Windows, and my dislike of Windows Vista, which at launch was less than ideal (it has since improved). Second was the purchase of an iPod touch, a device I instantly fell in love with. It was only a matter of a few months before I decided that I needed a new computer for development work, and I bought the MacBook. That was eight months ago, and I've never been happier with a computer in my life. It is definitely a developer's machine, and it has streamlined my development tremendously.
I'm currently living with my partner (who also switched to Mac the same time I did, with a MacBook Pro) in Honesdale, PA, where I am developing new web services.
My main question to Microsoft as a developer is: What have you done for me lately?
To be fair, on the desktop side, things are looking pretty spiffy. .NET is a solid platform, and writing Windows apps is pretty easy.
But I don't care about desktop. I care about mobile, and Microsoft has hung us WinMo developers out to dry. WinMo7 is a year away, likely more. WinMo5/6 is crap to write applications for. And Microsoft refuses to share any real details on WinMo7 with developers.
Meanwhile, iPhone devs are making bank. They earn more in a month than most WinMo devs earn in a year.
To keep WinMo devs, Microsoft has to release an early access SDK and emulator now. Never mind that they'll tip their hand - the competition is way past them anyways.
Please, MS. Do something to keep me. Do something before this loyal developer buys a Mac and starts writing for iPhone! Oops! Too late.
My main question to Microsoft as a developer is: What have you done for me lately?
For me, the answer is, very little. I'm a web developer, and in the web world, open source is where it's at. Microsoft doesn't ship with Open Source tools at all. My Mac came with Python, Ruby, Tcl, and GCC.
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But I don't care about desktop. I care about mobile, and Microsoft has hung us WinMo developers out to dry. WinMo7 is a year away, likely more. WinMo5/6 is crap to write applications for. And Microsoft refuses to share any real details on WinMo7 with developers.
I don't care too much about desktop either, other than apps I write for myself, and most of them are command line apps just because I'd rather not be bothered learning a widget library. I can use Tkinter in Python if I have to, but I generally don't need to.
As to Windows Mobile, my only contact with it was a guy who paid me to sync his phone for him (yeah, he couldn't figure out how to sync the phone.) To be fair, he was trying to sync it with Act, which isn't exactly intuitive. Other than that, I've never used a WinMo phone, but I've heard horror stories from developers.
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To keep WinMo devs, Microsoft has to release an early access SDK and emulator now. Never mind that they'll tip their hand - the competition is way past them anyways.
This has always been the problem with proprietary systems. Companies are so worried about the possible lose of R&D on their IP that they totally leave developers out in the cold. Apple can be as guilty as Microsoft on that one, but they've been somewhat okay with the iPhone SDK. I wish they were a little more transparent about why they reject some apps and let others in, but que sera. I don't write iPhone apps anyhow.
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Please, MS. Do something to keep me. Do something before this loyal developer buys a Mac and starts writing for iPhone! Oops! Too late.
Please MS. Do something to keep me. Support a REAL open strategy and ship with open source tools. Before it's too late. Oh wait, it already is.
A Brief Introduction to a Mac Convert
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